Courtroom Notebook

Menendez Justice

After a long trial, two hung juries, and an earthquake, the story of Lyle and Erik Menendez seems murkier than ever. But, in interviews with friends and relatives of the confessed killers, the author, who has followed the case for Vanity Fair from its bloody beginnings, debunks the tearful defense of sexual molestation that divided the juries, the press, and the public—and turned a family tragedy into a marathon courtroom drama.

There are people who think these kids should get the Nobel Prize. We’ve all made a mistake, or most of us have, which is we’ve assumed
that they were abused, and there’s no reason to think they were
abused. —Steven Brill, creator of Court TV, on Charlie Rose,
January 12, 1994.

So what happened? I’ll tell you what happened. I was there, and these are my beliefs. Two juries took the word of two world-class liars, two rich, spoiled, arrogant losers who were already on the road to a criminal life when they shot their mother’s face off and their father’s brains out. Two juries made up of people the killers privately expressed to friends and confidants they didn’t quite consider to be their peers fell for their pretty faces, their crocodile tears, and their extravagant lies. Correction. Not all the jurors did. Only some of them. And that’s all it takes to hang a jury. Those who went along with the defense were in the thrall of a tiny, mesmerizing, brilliant, overpowering 50-year-old woman who dominated the proceedings from the beginning to the end of a six-month trial, leaving everyone in the dust behind her. She was impassioned. She was moving. She was possessed with fervor. She was often enraged. She was also mean, harsh, crude, and gutter-mouthed. Even the two well-known but uncivilized words ending with u-c-k-e-r were not alien to her vocabulary. She reserved one for the prosecution’s chief witness, Dr. L. Jerome Oziel, to whom the killers had confessed their crime. She reserved the other for Judge Stanley M. Weisberg, who had made a ruling in which she didn’t agree. “And you can print that,” she snapped at one reporter in the elevator after her attack on the judge.

In a post-trial interview with Terry Moran on Court TV, Leslie Abramson, with a patient smile and a dismissive they-don’t-get-it shake of her head, called those jurors who held out for a murder conviction “uneducable,” as if their minds were too dim to understand the consequences of abuse. That two people had been brutally slain seemed to be a matter of irrelevance. Their names were not even mentioned in the interview. Abramson’s job, however, was not to educate jurors. Her job was to convince them. She almost did. Her amazing persuasive powers convinced a great many people that the molestation had taken place.

Look how compelling these abuse cases are. I mean, you have these clients who are not criminals, but sympathetic, decent people who are in terrible trouble. And their so-called victims are nothing short of monsters who deserved to be stopped. Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you’re a victim, a saint. Hitler is dead too. —Leslie Abramson, quoted by Gay Jervey, The American Lawyer, May 1991.

I found myself to be both repulsed and fascinated by the Menendez brothers. “Cry for what has been done to us, not for what we have done to others” seemed to be the bottom line of their testimony and their courtroom presence. Contrition and repentance evaded them. Rarely have parents been so defiled by their children, or victims by their killers. Throughout, the brothers acted as if forgiveness were their due. The parents they killed had already forgiven them their trespasses during their flirtation with criminal life, trespasses that would have put less fortunate young men in reform schools or jails. The parents had paid off for them, and made the major parental error of not dealing with the problems that caused the transgressions. In the final family irony, the hard-earned fortune of Jose Menendez, a Cuban immigrant who had made good, paid for the high-priced legal team that was expected to get his sons forgiven again.

Lest I be grouped in that contemptible circle of people Abramson calls uneducable on the subject, those people who cannot and will not understand the gravity of child abuse, I feel reluctantly obliged to reveal my own deep secret on that matter. I was abused as a child, although the term “child abuse” was not in use at the time. I was not abused sexually, but physically and psychologically. I was beaten with straps, hangers, and riding crops. I have had welts on my legs and thighs. To this day I remain partially deaf from a blow to the ear when I was in the fifth grade. I was a sissy. I was not good at sports. I embarrassed my father, a prominent heart surgeon in Hartford, Connecticut, who was otherwise a loved and highly respected figure. Although the beatings eventually stopped, the mockery continued until the day my father delivered me to the induction center in New Haven, Connecticut, when I was 18 years old, to go off and serve in World War II. When I returned, the medal I wore on my chest, pinned on by a general after an incident in battle, changed the dynamic between my father and me. Sissies don’t wear medals. He died before any rapprochement was made. The obligatory conversation between us which might have heralded an understanding for the future was never held. Now, decades later, I still remember. I am unable even to visit his grave. But I never wanted to kill him. The thought never once entered my mind. There were alternatives. I went away to boarding school. I went away to war. I went away to college. I went away to my life.

Today, statistics indicate that more than three American children die each day from abuse or neglect. It is a subject that must be reckoned with. But it is also a subject that is being ludicrously overworked in the justice system. It has become an increasingly popular defense to gain an acquittal or an inconsequential verdict for the most heinous of crimes. Perpetrators need only to scream out “I was abused” and there is an expectation of forgiveness. Child abuse is such a volatile subject that a large section of the public need only hear the words to become passionate advocates of acquittal, no proof necessary.

At a White House state dinner, according to Newsday on November 26, President Clinton confessed to some dinner companions that he sneaks away from the Oval Office in the afternoon for a dose of the Menendez trail on Court TV. At the Court TV office in the media center outside the Van Nuys courthouse one day, a call came from someone in Mayor Richard Riordan’s office to say they were having trouble with the audio on their set.

“He raped me,” sobbed Lyle Menendez on the witness stand, in one of the most overwhelmingly emotional moments I have ever encountered in a courtroom. Tears ran down his cheeks. This was unexpected. This was the tough-guy brother. I was devastated by his first day on the stand as he told his story, elegantly guided by his lawyer Jill Lansing, who, like a docent in a museum explaining the intricacies of a complex painting, led him through the agony she depicted his life to be. Lansing made Lyle into a sympathetic, even likeable young man, hiding the part of him that would not surface until the surprise admissibility of what became known as the December 11 tape, on which he cold-bloodedly described to psychologist Dr. L. Jerome Oziel the vicious slaying of his mother as a mercy killing. Everyone had expected that it would be never-stop-crying kid brother Erik who would grip the courtroom, but it was Lyle who soared. He was brilliant. I believed him. I had tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat. I thought, My God, I’m wrong. This really did happen.

Lyle has all the instincts of a great neurotic actor, on the order of Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, or Judy Garland, the kind of stars studios hated because they held up production, but who will go down in cinema history as the magic ones. Like them, Lyle Menendez knew instinctively how to take his moment and turn it into theater. There were rumors, never verified, probably apocryphal, of an acting coach who visited him and his brother in jail, masquerading as a therapist. This much I know for sure: he was aware of the brilliance of his performance. He told people on the phone that he knew he was a more compelling witness than Erik, that he could see how he moved Erik’s jury when he was on the stand, and knew exactly which members cried. His observations squared with what we in the media had noticed at the time. He created a model for future defense witnesses to emulate. Within months, Lorena Bobbitt, another Court TV star, gave a similar tearful witness-stand account of the abuse that led her to cut off her husband’s penis. Subsequently, she was acquitted of the mutilation charge when her jury ruled that she was temporarily insane.

Jury deliberation in the trial of Lyle and Erik Menendez is now in its 14th day. After that, all that’s left is the verdict and the big wrap party at Spago. —David Letterman

A second magnificent and theatrical moment for Lyle was his confession that he had molested Erik when they were eight and six years old. He looked down from the stand at his brother sitting at the defense table and whispered, “I’m sorry, Erik.” Erik’s tortured face and tearful eyes responded to his brother’s apology. There was scarcely a dry eye in the courtroom. I didn’t think then, as I thought later, watching the same moment on television several times, how false, how bogus, how planned and rehearsed it actually was. Were we really to believe that in the 17 years since it happened, if it happened, they had never talked about it until they were in the courtroom, playing to the juries? These were brothers who had lived together, played tennis together, burgled together, killed their parents together, been in jail together for three and a half years. As a stunt, it worked. Was it real? Not to me. Is it actually even molestation, or merely experimentation, when two little brothers go off into the woods together?

Children’s tissues tear easily in sex with adults. —Marlise Simons, The New York Times Magazine, January 16, 1994.

Let’s get down to brass tacks about Jose Menendez raping his six-year-old son. The squeezed-tight little anus of a six-year-old is not an easy entry for a man-size penis. Surely, if it happened, the pain must have been unbearable, not just for the timespan of the rape itself, but for days and possibly weeks after. There must have been devastation to the rectal area. Other than to say it hurt and he bled, Lyle did not give any accounting of post-rape physical trauma. His attitude was more that of a straight guy being an unwilling participant in an unpleasant gay act than that of a rape victim. No medical records were produced.

“Why did the Menendez brothers kill their parents?”

“Why?”

“They didn’t like the way they were being reared.” —Joke told at a Beverly Hills dinner party.

Incest as a defense is in the air. The once unmentionable subject is on every tongue. Celebrity after celebrity, including Roseanne Arnold, Oprah Winfrey, and former Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur, has gone public with his or her story. People who in the beginning had said “Fry them” about the Menendez brothers began saying “Acquit them” after the defense presented its bold and daring strategy. However, even incest victims are at odds with one another over the veracity of the brothers’ story. Some who contacted me remained fervent in their belief that the story was fabricated. Others believed every word and were unswervable.

An incest survivor with whom I kept in touch during much of the trial doubted the truth of the molestation charge from the start. For this person, who has undergone years of therapy and has worked with other incest survivors, the three-hour trip to San Diego to buy the shotguns was the false note. If it had been a kitchen knife, or a gun already in the house, or any household instrument such as an ax or a pipe that might have been at hand, she would have believed the story. The advance planning and the use of a former friend’s ID to cover up also rang false to this person. “The defense in this case is destroying a new area of the law,” she said. “They are twisting it and contorting it to justify this crime that their clients have committed. This case causes many questions and concerns to be raised by some of us in the incest-survivor community. . . . Even though a significant number of children are told that they will be killed if they tell on their perpetrators, they simply choose not to murder them.”

All trials are minidramas. Not only is it important what the actors say and how they say it, but how they look. —Paul Mones, When a Child Kills.

I have heard straight from the mouth of a Menendez relative, with whom I met clandestinely during the trial, that the brothers’ account of the molestation was false, gleaned from books they read in jail, beginning with Paul Mones’s When a Child Kills: Abused Children Who Kill Their Parents, a study of true cases and how they were defended in court. Pamela Bozanich, the cool, no-nonsense prosecutor, made the point during the trial that much of the defense strategy was suggested by Mones’s book: “In one of the incidents related in the book, which dealt with sexual abuse as the basis of parricide, there was mention of Vaseline in the incident. There was mention of sex used to punish the child. There was talk about the defense attorneys’ need to collect all photos, diaries, letters, and everything in order to substantiate the abuse. There was indication that the defendant in this case was scared that he was homosexual. . . . There’s information on page 66 that the father’s sex was getting rougher, that the sex included being poked with pens and pencils … that the particular person was dressed up in sweaters in order to make him look younger for purpose of testifying.”

In court, Leslie Abramson said about the Mones book, “I’m familiar with the existence of that book. Surprisingly enough, I’ve never read it.”

The abovementioned Menendez relative was shocked to hear from Lyle during a jailhouse visit shortly before the beginning of the trial that the defense was going to be child abuse and molestation, and expressed to him total disbelief that the molestation had ever happened. The person told me Lyle looked away and said, in a voice remarkably like his father’s, “Well, that’s the way it’s going to be.”

Bree Walker Lampley, news anchor: You have to believe the person you are defending is telling the truth.

Leslie Abramson: No, you don’t. You don’t have to believe that at all. You want to know whether they are or not. —Television interview, KCBS, January 4, 1994.

To disagree with Leslie Abramson is a serious matter. You take her version of events as dogma, or else. Woe to him who dared to express that he did not find her killers as adorable as she did, or their killings as forgivable as she thought them to be. Anyone who differed with her was subject to her wrath, mockery, or vituperation. She publicly referred to one of my colleagues in the media as “despicable.” She referred to another as “that piece-of-garbage reporter.” I too experienced her rancor, after writing of my disbelief in the defense strategy of sexual molestation and imminent danger in the October issue of this magazine. That article signaled the end of any communication between us. Her first snub of me, in the corridor of the courthouse, was of the elaborate variety, with flaring nostrils and frizzy blond curls bouncing angrily, a snub meant to be noticed by bystanders, after a “Good morning” by me went unanswered. Thereafter, all civil relations ceased. I had become the enemy.

“Why are you having lunch with that prick?” she asked my friend Caroline Graham of The New Yorker, who came to have lunch with me one day in the cafeteria of the courthouse in Van Nuys.

Several references to me by her appeared in the court transcript. Some of it was funny. Once, in the courtroom, she called me a “brain surgeon,” after Now, the Tom Brokaw-Katie Couric show, had billboarded an appearance by me as taking the viewer “inside the minds of the Menendez brothers.” She called attention to the show by asking the judge to exhort the jurors not to watch it. When Erik Menendez was on the stand, Abramson put up on the bulletin board a photograph of Jose Menendez holding both his sons, at approximately four and six, which had appeared in my last article in Vanity Fair. She asked Erik if he was aware of the photograph. He replied that he was. She asked him where his father’s hand was placed. Erik replied that his father’s hand was placed on Lyle’s genitals. She asked, “Did the writer ever comment on where your father’s hand was?” Erik replied no. For me, it remained a long stretch to think that Jose Menendez was deliberately touching his son’s genitals in that posed picture.

Later, her attacks took on a more personal tone. The good thing about bad things’ being said about you is that they are repeated back within minutes. She said about me to one of the more influential reporters covering the case for a daily newspaper, “He is filled with hate since his daughter’s murder.” It is true that I lost a child to murder 12 years ago. It is true that I have covered many trials since. A few days later, Marta Cano, an aunt of Lyle and Erik, repeated the same thing in almost exactly the same words during an interview with two other reporters, who are writing a book about the case. I was told that even Lyle Menendez, on trial for parricide, had said about me in a telephone call, “He has things to work out.” Abramson described me to still another reporter during an interview as “a vampire who haunts courtrooms.” The implication was that my personal tragedy disqualified me from reporting on the issue of murder, which is rather like saying that James Brady, who was gunned down by a would-be assassin’s bullet, has no right to be an advocate for gun control.

Lyle Menendez’s testimony changed my life. And I do have a life. I believe in them, and I wanted to stand alongside them. Do you have the same feeling I do? I just want to take my boys home and tell them they’ll never have to be harmed again. —Two pro-Menendez ladies in the courthouse corridor.

A long trial became a life in itself. Private dramas and comedies occurred that were not written about in the Los Angeles Times or talked about on Court TV. As the trial grew more intense, polarization of the occupants of the courtroom became evident. We in the media never spoke to the jurors, and the jurors never spoke to us. Nor did the two juries speak to each other. But they all knew who we were, just as we all knew who they were. We called one Ethel, because she looked like Ethel Kennedy. We called one Willie, because he looked like Willie Nelson. Three young women who were always together became known as Leslie’s girls. We watched which ones cried. We watched which ones rolled their eyes. It was not necessarily the issue of abuse that polarized the jury, as Abramson claimed after the mistrial. It seemed to be gender. She understood her audience; she appeared to know exactly which members of the jury were sympathetic to her, and she played to them. Pro-defense court watchers, who tended to be young, remained aloof from pro-prosecution court watchers, who tended to be older. We in the assigned media seats were also polarized, although we generally remained on good terms. I was pro-prosecution all the way and made no bones about it. Robert Rand, who is writing a book about the case, was pro-defense all the way and made no bones about it. The writers for the daily papers had to straddle the fence in their reporting, but their personal opinions became known. Again, gender was a factor.

Often the corridors of the courthouse were filled with young admirers of the Menendez brothers. On more than one occasion, I heard them say with indignation, “They should walk.” About that, they were right. They should have walked out of the house at 722 North Elm Drive in Beverly Hills. They should have gotten into the red Alfa Romeo convertible Jose Menendez had recently given Lyle for his birthday, the car Lyle didn’t like, the car he called “a piece of shit” because he had wanted a $70,000 Porsche. They should have driven and driven and driven, as far as possible from their “lifetime of terror, their life time of threats,” as the defense characterized their lives, and started over. It was a viable alternative to the violent choice they made.

One of the overriding questions about the case from the beginning was why these young men did not simply leave home, or go to the police and report the perverted father they described in such detail to the court. However much the defense referred to them as “children,” “kids,” and “boys,” they were not. Children, kids, and boys who are abused have no choice but to remain in a life of misery. The Menendez brothers were old enough and strong enough to purchase 12-gauge shotguns and fire some 16 rounds into their parents, which no child would ever be able to do.

In their wonderfully scripted scenario, the Menendez brothers had an answer for all these problematic questions.

Why hadn’t they run away? Lyle said that they had thought of it, but that “they would find us, and they could find us wherever we went.” Why hadn’t they gone to the police to report the molestation? “My dad was a very powerful, influential, well-known person in Beverly Hills,” said Lyle, and for that reason they had not believed the Beverly Hills police would protect them. Detective Les Zoeller of the Beverly Hills Police Department, who has been on the case from the night of the murders, who was responsible for the arrest of the two brothers seven months later, and who sat alongside Pamela Bozanich and Lester Kuriyama at the prosecution table throughout the trial, smiled and shook his head when I questioned him about that response.

Just how rich and famous was Jose Menendez that he could locate his sons anywhere and intimidate the police, as Lyle suggested? This is another of the greatly exaggerated tales of the trial. The defense’s depiction of Jose’s importance in the film industry and the Beverly Hills community exceeds the reality of the man’s situation. Despite all of Jose’s family’s awestruck talk of his wealth and great success, he was never considered one of the power figures to be reckoned with in what is known in Hollywood as the Industry.

Outside of Live Entertainment, the video-distribution company that was a subsidiary of Carolco Pictures, his name was virtually unknown. Although his half-million-dollar-a-year salary plus $850,000 bonus sounds high in most places, it’s no more than middle income by Hollywood-executive standards. One of the most successful men in the television industry, whose fortune has been estimated in the $100 million range, said to me about Jose’s much-publicized wealth, “Fourteen million? That’s nothing.” He had reached the high middle, but never the top, of the ladder. In the accepted fashion of people at his level, he was heavily mortgaged and lived beyond his means. Everyone agreed that great things awaited him in his future, but, in reality, Jose was famous more for the circumstances of his death than for any of his achievements in life.

So heavily was public opinion orchestrated to the bad side of Jose Menendez that I did not know until after my last article appeared in this magazine that the executive staff of his company—with a few exceptions, such as Roger Smith, the acting president after his death, who eulogized him at the first memorial service and then took the stand for the defense to say how detestable he was—loved him and respected him greatly. “His death was devastating to the office,” said Marzie Eisenberg, his secretary for eight years. “We adored him, we mourned him. He taught me everything,” said Vicki Greenleaf, his vice president of public relations. “I am outraged by his portrayal,” said Patty Matlen, his director of post-production.

Intrigued? Find more of Dominick Dunne’s coverage of the Menendez brothers here.

During her marathon 12-hour closing argument, Leslie Abramson hissed out a list of words that her defense witnesses had used to describe Jose Menendez. Strict. Sarcastic. Belittling. Ridiculing. Humiliating. Successful. Reserved. Private. Image-conscious. Intimidating. Cruel. Controlling. Intelligent. Angry. Strong-willed. Competitive. Arrogant. Intense. Demanding. Stern. Obnoxious. Abusive. Unfair. Confrontational. Attractive. Belligerent. Rude. Nasty. Frightening. Charismatic. Articulate. Dominating. Dictatorial. Sadistic. Unrealistic. Harshly critical. Emotionally harsh. Although many of the same words might be used to give an accurate description of Abramson, it is interesting to point out that not one of the defense witnesses, even those who hated him, described Jose Menendez as the pervert father his sons said he was.

I know that you sometimes worry about your future. I have total trust in both you and Erik and have no concerns about your future and your future role in your country. I urge you as you go through life and enjoy the fruits of your work and the good fortune of your heritage to think of your family, your country, and your fellow citizens. I believe that both you and Erik can make a difference. I believe that you will! —Letter from Jose Menendez to Lyle, which Lyle read at his parents’ memorial service.

The only sources for the molestation defense were Erik and Lyle Menendez themselves. They got slight secondhand support from two cousins, but to me neither was convincing. When the brothers confessed to Erik’s psychologist, Dr. Oziel, every gory detail of how they had killed their parents, including the extremely damaging testimony that they ran out of ammunition and had to go outside to reload Lyle’s gun so that he could return and fire the final shot into his dying mother’s face, neither mentioned that their father sexually molested them both. Subsequently, bad things came out about Oziel. Abramson, in a staggering feat of attempting to destroy a man’s credibility and reputation, made mincemeat of the doctor, but at the time of Erik’s confession to him, which greatly angered Lyle, Erik had no misgivings about Dr. Oziel’s character. Who better to discuss your sexual abuse with than your psychologist? The defense had an answer for that too: the Menendez family kept secrets, not only from the outside world but also from one another, and for Erik the molestation was so shameful a secret that he could not bring himself to share it even with his psychologist. But surely if it was the motive for committing the parricide, it could hardly have been considered untoward or disloyal to the father they had killed to bring it up, if only in the I-did-it-because phase of the confession.

As his brother noted, Erik Menendez was a far less compelling witness in his own defense than Lyle. As for the shameful secret of sex abuse that he could not bear to mention to Dr. Oziel, he had no trouble talking about it to the juries, the court, the television camera, and the world at large once he took the stand. Leslie Abramson claimed in an article in the Los Angeles Times before the trial started that there had been more than 300 separate acts of molestation, a claim that was not repeated in the courtroom. If it had been, Erik probably would have been able to describe each one. As it was, he told too much. It was overkill. What is utterly shocking on first hearing can begin to sound commonplace if it is repeated incessantly. I was not alone in wondering if he was not transferring some of his own sexual experiences onto his father. There was no detail too intimate, or too personal, for him to reveal. Some of his revelations actually caused jokes to be made. He said that he had disliked the taste of his father’s semen. But after learning from friends at school that cinnamon in a man’s coffee or tea sweetened the taste of his semen, he had solved that problem. Arleen Sorkin, a Hollywood wit, writer, and actress, who followed the trial avidly on Court TV, remarked, “The day after Erik said that, there wasn’t a packet of cinnamon to be found in any supermarket in the city.” Cinnamon in coffee has a very distinctive taste. It would hardly have gone unnoticed by Jose Menendez, who, if he was the cruel father Erik said he lived in fear of, would probably have exacted revenge in sexual punishment.

About every woman who spoke up for Jose, I was told dismissively by his detractors, whether they knew her or not, “Oh, he was probably fucking her.” If Jose Menendez had sex with as many women as people said he did, I don’t know how there could have been a drop left over for Erik to detest the taste of.

A courtroom is a place where people lie. —Jimmy Breslin

Erik told the court that his mother squeezed blisters on his penis, but he did not say how the blisters got there. He said that his father forced four categories of sex on him. They were called Knees, Nice Sex, Rough Sex, and Sex. Knees stood for oral sex while he was kneeling in front of his father. Nice sex meant hand or mouth “massage.” Rough sex meant having needles and tacks stuck into him, or having his penis tied up with rope, while performing oral sex. Sex meant anal penetration of him.

If Jose did stick needles and tacks into his son’s thighs and buttocks, didn’t Erik bleed? Didn’t Erik have scabs on his rear and thighs? I tried sticking a thumbtack into my buttocks and I bled. Here was a young boy who had played in tennis tournaments from the age of nine. He spent a great deal of his life in country-club locker rooms. Didn’t that endless cadre of tennis and swimming coaches whom the defense flew in from everywhere with Kitty and Jose’s money ever notice anything strange about the boy’s buttocks in the shower room? If the act of sticking the needles and tacks into his body even remotely approached the savagery with which Leslie Abramson depicted it in her closing argument, when she jammed tacks into a photograph of six-year-old Erik’s private area, it is likely that it would have had lasting effects.

I hated it. I hated it. I hated it. —Erik Menendez on the stand.

Erik’s defense never seemed to be able to let well enough alone, to quit when they were ahead. They kept loading it on, and often went too far. Some of Erik’s testimony seemed almost absurd. He said that at times his father lit candles in his room before the dreaded molestation began. Incest is usually a furtive act of darkness, over quickly, having to do with power, rarely having anything whatever to do with love and romance, as the candlelit room would indicate, especially when the rectum was as reluctant an entry point as Erik tearfully insisted it was. Again, trying to explain that he and his brother feared that their parents were going to kill them—which motivated the sons to kill the parents—he said, “I thought he was going to kill me that night, and I thought he was going to have sex with me first.” It was just too elaborate an explanation. One or the other would have been sufficient, but the idea of Jose suggesting “one last fuck before I kill you” seemed ridiculously overdone to me.

Throughout the trial it was impressed on us by Leslie Abramson, and by aunts and cousins who took the stand, that Erik was the crybaby and weakling of the family. Marzie Eisenberg, Jose Menendez’s secretary, and Craig Cignarelli, who had once been Erik’s best friend, both said that the Erik in the courtroom bore very little resemblance to the Erik that they knew. Eisenberg remembered him affectionately as a typical teenager. Cignarelli described him as fun-loving and mischievous in high school. In court, he came across as a dour, tragic victim. There was a bet in the media center as to how quickly he would break down on the stand. He did break down, but only once, and it had none of the pathos or drama of Lyle’s first cry. He was on Xanax, it turned out. In a sidebar, Abramson told Judge Weisberg that Erik was nervous and needed the tranquilizer. The Xanax rendered him emotionless, as if the very act of speaking were an enormous effort. One day he seemed to space out looking at the microphone in front of him. In his report on Court TV that night, Terry Moran described him as stoned. Perhaps the Xanax was a mistake. Perhaps it would have been better for him to break down on the stand, have a nervous collapse, have to be carried out of the courtroom in hysterics by the bailiffs. It would have been a front-page story. Instead, he looked strange. His eyes had a Children of the Damned look about them.

There were members on both sides of Lyle and Erik’s own family who refused to buy Leslie Abramson’s account of sexual abuse, but they remained hushed about their private opinions. One of them who had been particularly close to the sons said, “Wouldn’t I have seen something? A sign in all those years? I would have seen something. Lyle can keep his mouth shut, but Erik talks. Erik would have said something. Never a word? Never. It was in the personality of the child.”

Lyle is a Capricorn. Capricorns are so organized that they plan everything perfectly, right down to which crystal goblet the poison will go in. Erik is a Sagittarius. Sagittarians are so good-natured and plodding that they forget to wipe the mud off their boots when leaving the scene of a crime, and they can’t wait to confess everything to the nearest priest. —Michael Lutin, astrologer.

It remained unclear how two brothers could commit such a barbaric crime. What really happened that night? The why of it was never discovered, why they did what they did in the manner they did it. There was always been something not right, an element missing in the story, an important element, something the brothers know that no one else knows, possibly not even the lawyers who defended them. That secret is theirs and will probably remain theirs. Certainly, the reason, whatever it was, was more than greed, as the prosecution contended, although greed was probably a factor. It was more than hate, although hate was a factor. Many doubted that it was sexual molestation, as the defense insisted. And it most certainly wasn’t imminent danger, as the defense also insisted. So what was it? What could have happened?

Good father or bad, Jose Menendez was not unentitled to a certain amount of vexation over the two arrogant sons he had raised. This was a father who saw his immigrant dream of building a Cuban-American dynasty evaporating, as he watched the dismal failures they were becoming. Jose had aspirations of making his pile in the picture business and then moving to Florida to become a senator. He saw his sons as his successors. He had visions of a family compound, à la the Kennedys, where his sons would live near him with their wives and families. But that was never meant to be. There were problems, serious problems, with both sons. The brothers had been involved in a couple of burglaries around the town of Calabasas, where the family lived before they made what was virtually an overnight move to the death house at 722 North Elm Drive, Beverly Hills, in the aftermath of the burglary disgrace. Although the defense and the expert witnesses brought on by the defense to explain away the killings dismissed the Calabasas burglaries as teenage high jinks or adolescent acting-out, these were not inconsequential crimes. A less affluent burglar could have been doing hard crime for them, but Jose was there, as always, checkbook in hand, to straighten out the latest transgression. Only two burglaries were alluded to during the trial. The total amount of money and property the brothers took from the houses of their friends’ parents, when they were away, was in excess of $100,000. They used some of the money from the first burglary to buy walkie-talkies to perfect their technique for future heists, but their lucrative criminal path was brought to an early halt when a friend reported them to the police. Another burglary, involving only Lyle and a friend, in which Lyle burgled the new owners of the house in Princeton, New Jersey, where the Menendezes had lived before they moved to California, was not brought up in the trial. Jose Menendez was devastated by his son’s venality. “He cried after the Calabasas issue, after I said that Erik and I were sorry,” said Lyle to Dr. Oziel on the confessional tape, made on December 11, 1989. “And I think he cried after that Princeton issue.” The Princeton issue referred not to the Princeton burglary but to Lyle’s enforced leave-taking from Princeton University, where it had been his father’s life dream for him to go. Every Princeton student writes out a pledge before taking a test or exam, which says, “I pledge my honor that I have not violated the honor code during this examination.” Despite Jose’s impassioned pleas to Princeton, Lyle was suspended during his first semester for cheating. He was eligible for reinstatement a year later, and returned. That summer, he killed his parents.

Other people saw signs that Kitty and Jose did not see. In the month before the killings, one relative told me, she had warned Kitty that Lyle was out of control.

“Out of control how?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Just in trouble all the time. Partying too much, like every night was Friday or Saturday. I was worried about him.”

Marzie Eisenberg had noticed, too. She said, “Lyle was always getting into a lot of trouble. I once said to Jose, ‘Give those kids to me for six months and I’ll show them what the real world is all about.’ ”

Eisenberg said that Jose expected great things from his sons. She said that he and Kitty gave them everything, and that Jose was a pushover for them. Jose’s sister Teresita Baralt, known as Terry, said, “Perhaps Jose should have asked the boys if what he wanted for them was what they wanted.” She said that Jose expected too much of his sons, more than they could deliver.

Terry Baralt was the only Menendez family member who conveyed the sense that a tragedy had occurred, that the lives of none of the family members would ever be the same again. On the stand, unlike her many relatives who had partaken of Jose’s grandiosity in life and then dumped him at the trial, Terry Baralt remained loyal to her nephews, whom she genuinely loved, without betraying her brother and sister-in-law. She refused to jump on the bandwagon to assassinate their characters.

I will do anything to keep the boys from the gas chamber, but they must go to prison. They must. —Menendez relative.

That Jose Menendez was fed up with his wayward sons was no secret to some people. Carlos Baralt, Jose’s lifelong friend, the husband of Jose’s sister Terry, and the executor of Jose and Kitty’s will, recalled for me a conversation he had with Jose in the back of a limousine in New York. Jose told him he had given his sons too much. He had not punished them enough. He had talked about taking them out of his will. It is not inconceivable that Jose was about to cut his sons off, kick them out of the house, and force them to make their own way, as he had had to do as a young immigrant. It might have been the making of them, but people who are used to a free ride on the merry-go-round are often reluctant to get off.

There was also another factor that may have played a large part in the family eruption that must have preceded the killings. That subject matter was Erik Menendez’s possible homosexuality. Leslie Abramson fought like a tigress to keep it out of the trial and almost did, while at the same time the defense tried to depict the homophobic Jose as being homosexually inclined. It was alleged that Jose showed a pornographic film to his sons and neighbors when the brothers were very young. The purpose was to indicate his filth and vileness, to point out the low moral character of the child molester. But the name of the picture was not Johnny Hard-on or Tits on Parade. It was called Pixote, and was a prizewinning Brazilian film about poor children in Rio who are forced into prostitution to survive. It had been submitted by the Brazilian film board to the Motion Picture Academy as the best film of the year from that country. Those rather pertinent facts were never mentioned. A jar of Vaseline in the bookcase headboard of Erik’s bed was very strongly hinted to be Jose’s lubricant for anal penetration of his son. A more plausible explanation is that Erik used the Vaseline to run on his hands for calluses after tennis. A maid who had helped Kitty Menendez for several days while she moved into the Elm Drive house was brought on by the defense to say that she had discovered stacks of gay pornographic magazines in Jose’s room. Only recently, a well-known Hollywood composer who visited the house constantly when it was rented by a famous rock star before the Menendez family bought it told me that all the gay porn had been left behind in the closet of the master bedroom when the rock star moved out. Furthermore, constant rumors circulated that photographs had been discovered in Brazil of a gay teenage orgy in which Jose was a participant, and that Jose’s name was on the Rolodex of a pedophile hustler service in Miami, but nothing came of those rumors in the trial.

The words “gay” and “homosexual” were of so fearful a nature to most members of the Menendez family with whom I spoke that they were unable to deal with them. Whenever the subject arose in conversation, I was immediately corrected with the word “bisexual,” as if that lessened the shame for them.

One response I received startled me with its directness. “Jose was homophobic, but in his kind of business there were a lot of gays, and he grew to accept that in other people. But he could never accept it in his own kids, if it were true. I think the hate that Erik has was with his father’s inability to accept the way he was. Given time, Jose may have been able to cope with it. The initial finding-out would have been devastating for him. He would have come around in time, but it takes a while. It’s a very strong possibility.”

In reality, Jose might never have come around. Perhaps not even Kitty. On the stand Erik said that his mother pressured him to get a girl—gave him six months to find one. He did, but they broke up shortly after.

“[My mother] would say, ‘What, are you gay? What, are you not man enough for her? … Is this what your problem is?’ ”

“Did your father call you a negative name for gay people?” asked Abramson.

“Yeah. He called me a faggot. . . . He called me a fag or a faggot. He used both of them. He hated gay people.”

There was a time when Erik Menendez considered becoming an actor and model. A friend from that period, Philip Kearney, a former West Hollywood photographer now living in New Orleans, took modeling pictures of Erik and formed a brief relationship with him in 1988, after the family moved to Beverly Hills. “When I knew him, it was after the Calabasas burglaries, which he talked about,” said Kearney. “Erik had no feeling that he had done something wrong. He was just embarrassed that he was caught and had to face his father.”

“Did you have an affair with Erik?” I asked.

There was a long pause. “Spiritually, yes. Physically, almost,” he replied. “I met him on the street in Beverly Hills. He wanted some modeling pictures, and I took them.”

A person in Miami, who knew the family, suggested that Jose was so troubled by the possibility of his son’s homosexuality that he sought help for him through Santería, a Cuban religion which in some ways is similar to Haitian voodoo. By means of animal sacrifice, Santería is sometimes used to rid people of evil spirits that possess them. In the sexual scenes with his father that Erik described on the stand, he mentioned the lighting of candles and the sticking of needles and tacks into his thighs and buttocks, both of which suggest something more ritualistic than sexual. A tip that Jose had seen a brujo, or witch doctor, who ran a Cuban restaurant in Los Angeles, led to a wild-goose chase between me and another reporter that came to naught. A Cuban friend in Palm Beach put me in touch with people in the Miami area who participated in Santería, but there was a reluctance to talk and then my phone calls went unanswered.

What Erik and I did took courage beyond belief. Beyond, beyond strength. There was no way I was gonna make a decision to kill my mother without Erik’s consent. I didn’t even wanna influence him on that issue. I just let him sleep on it for a couple of days. —Lyle Menendez to Dr. Oziel on December 11, 1989.

Kitty Menendez was the defense’s big problem. Kitty may have been a pitiful woman, but she had done nothing that could have given her sons the right to kill her, certainly not with such cruelty. A family member told me that Kitty changed completely after she discovered her husband was having an affair. The fact that the affair had been going on for six years without her having any knowledge of it was devastating to her. Her reaction to Jose’s infidelity was described to me as “like getting punched in the stomach, very hard.” She felt totally betrayed and her behavior became obsessive. The one time she actually spoke to the mistress was outside the woman’s office building in New York, where Kitty, knowing what she looked like, approached her. Instead of the hysteria we might have expected from the way Kitty was portrayed in the trial, the meeting, according to Pamela Bozanich, the prosecutor, who spoke with the woman, was pleasant, even cordial—two women who wanted the same man, talking about him. The mistress chose not to be a witness in the trial.

No stone was left unturned to assassinate Kitty’s character or mock her life. Relatives and neighbors and teachers and coaches and people who said they were her friends were brought on by the defense to say things such as: Her hair was messy and needed a bleach job. Or, she lost her children in malls when they were young and continued with her shopping even after security announced over the P.A. system that they had been found. Or, she picked her children up from school in sweats. Or, she was a dangerous driver. Or, there were ferret feces on the floor of her house. Her sister-in-law, even her own sister, rushed to put more nails in her coffin. Marta Cano, a sister of Jose Menendez, who had spent virtually the entire period between the killings and the memorial service in Jose’s office going through his files looking for insurance policies and financial statements, became one of the foundation stones of the defense strategy, remembering in specific detail every wrongdoing of her sister-in-law over the years. “She told me she wished [Lyle and Erik] had never been born, because they had broken her marriage. She told me they had made her life miserable and separated her from Jose,” said Cano. She said she heard Kitty encourage her children to lie. She told jurors that Kitty had raised her sons in total chaos, amid “piles of dirty clothes.” When asked by prosecutor Pamela Bozanich if she could find anything positive to say about her, Cano conceded that Kitty was intelligent, could move a Christmas tree from place to place without any help, and could assemble a new barbeque all by herself. In her effort to defend her nephews, Cano unwittingly provided one of the great laughs of the trial. She told jurors that when she filled the brothers in on the extent of the fortune they were about to inherit, they were shocked that their father had left so much money. She said that Erik cared so little for money that “if he did inherit he would give this money to homeless kids who had run away from home.” Cognizant of the $700,000 spending spree the brothers went on after the killings, Pamela Bozanich was not about to let that whopper pass unnoticed. She asked Marta Cano how much of the insurance money Erik received went to homeless boys.

Joan Vandermolen, after first shedding tears for her departed sister, testified that Kitty was an intensely private woman, but she also said that her sister took four years off her age on her driver’s license, and that she was “elated” and “excited to have a Beverly Hills Zip Code. She described a letter she had found in Kitty’s “nightstand” after her death, a letter Kitty had written to Jose, telling him how much she loved him. She said her sister’s letter was “so private, so personal, so graphic,” so sexually explicit in describing his “body parts.” She said she had also found a sexually explicit “cheap paperback novel” that Kitty had been reading, and a pornographic video in Kitty’s closet, both of which she confiscated. Why Vendermolen felt obliged to reveal these intimate things, or why she had allowed herself to be talked into revealing them, was a mystery. There is very little love lost between the Menendezes and Kitty’s family, the Andersens. A Menendez relative said to me, “I was very shocked by what she said. I got a lot of things out of that house. I didn’t find dirty movies.”

In the end, Vandermolen’s testimony added up to nothing more than that the deeply unhappy Kitty watched and read a little porn and loved her faithless husband a little too much. If she still had a weak spot for Jose’s genitalia after years of an unhappy marriage, was it really necessary to bring up such an extremely private letter from such an extremely private woman? The story had no relevance to the trial other than to discredit the victim.

A crime of rage is 1 shot, 2 shots maybe, but somewhere between 1 shot and 16 shots you look at your brother and say, “You know, Lyle, I’m not as pissed off as I was 7 shots ago.” —George Schlatter, Hollywood producer, director, and writer.

For five months people in the courtroom watched the unlovely spectacle of three female defense attorneys trying to make the slain mother of their clients killable to the juries. The dead woman was attacked in a rampage of verbal violence that equaled and occasionally surpassed in gore the contact wound made when Lyle Menendez fired into her cheek after Erik had helped him reload his spent weapon, the shot that turned Kitty Menendez’s face into near nothingness. Kitty’s body was found on the floor of the family room, next to her dead husband’s feet. Her face lay in her own coagulating blood. One of her eyes was shot out and her nose was gone. Her teeth had been knocked out of her mouth by the impact of the contact blast, except for the one that hung loose from the top gum, like a hag’s. Her hair stood straight up, like Don King’s, from the impact of the final blast. Her left breast, which had presumably once suckled her sons, was a mass of ugly pellet wounds. The fingers of one of her hands, with their freshly manicured pink nails, were intertwined with her own guts and matter.

Jill Lansing suggested that Kitty had made sexual overtures to Lyle.

“Sometimes when she asked you how she looked, would she be inappropriately attired?” Lansing asked.

“She would be topless. Usually just topless or, like, an open robe,” replied Lyle. He was 11 at the time.

“When you say she would wash you with a sponge, would she just wash your back?”

“No. She would wash me everywhere.”

“She would wash your genitals?”

“Yes.”

“Did you continue to sleep in her bed around this time when you were 11 and 12?”

The single words gave away to statements: She cheated all over the place. She lied about her age. She helped Erik get a fake driver’s license. She did their schoolwork for them. She cheated at games. I ask you: Would you ever leave your child with this woman? Is this a mommy? She smoked abusively. She was not affectionate. She was not demonstrative. She was not praising, comforting, supportive, tender, or kind.

Now here is an amazing statistic about Russia. You won’t hear this anywhere else but here onThe Tonight Show.Even though they were fighting for over a week, the Russian army still had not fired as many shots as the Menendez brothers. Is that unbelievable? —Jay Leno

One of the questions asked most often was why so many relatives of the victims came to help their killers. The most common explanation was that Kitty and Jose were gone, and their sons, however imperfect, where all that was left of the family. Not all of the relatives answered the defense call, however. Milton Andersen, one of Kitty’s two brothers, who lives in Oak Lawn, a suburb of Chicago, gave a front-page interview in Daily Southtown, an Illinois newspaper, in which he called the defense strategy “bull” and said he agreed with the prosecution that his nephews had killed their parents out of greed. He said that at first he had not believed that they had committed the killings, and had visited them in jail. Then Leslie Abramson and Jill Lansing went to see him in Oak Lawn. “They tried to convince me what bad people my sister and brother-in-law were, but I didn’t buy it,” he was quoted as saying. “My sister didn’t abuse her children.” Later, when I encountered Andersen in the corridor of the courthouse in Van Nuys, he expressed dismay at the testimony of Joan Vandermolen. “If my sister should call me up to wish me a Happy Thanksgiving,” he said, “I’d hang up the phone on her. That goes for my nieces and nephews who testified, too.”

At times, one overheard snippets of conversation among the legal teams about their lives outside the courtroom. One day in the corridor, Jill Lansing spoke to Paul Mones, the author ofWhen a Child Kills,who was serving the defense as an adviser: “Are you going to the dinner Saturday night?”

“What dinner?” Mones asked.

“The kindergarten parents’ dinner.”

The chief topic of conversation at every dinner table in Beverly Hills for the six months I was there covering the trial was the trial itself. Billy Wilder, the great film director, resisted the trial in the beginning but slowly got sucked into its vortex, like everyone else. What fascinated him was how the defense strategy may have come about. He imagined the process as being like a story conference at a film studio, a group of people sitting around a table trying to figure out a plotline. “How about this?” one might say. Or “This might work.”

Kitty Menendez had to be incorporated into the brothers’ version of the days preceding the killings. Indeed, she became the linchpin that provided the motivation for the catastrophe that was to follow, as well as the instigator of the dénouement, when, Erik claimed, she told him that she had always known about the molestation. On the Tuesday before the Sunday of the killings, Kitty, we were told way back in the opening statements in July, pulled off Lyle Menendez’s hairpiece in a fit of rage during a family argument. That aggressive act and the shock that followed set in motion the events that ended with a fusillade of fire that killed the two parents.

Lyle Menendez’s state-of-the-art hairpiece, or toupee, or wig, or hair replacement, as his very expensive rug was variously called, became a constant prop in the trial, almost as important as the two missing Mossberg 12-gauge shotguns the brothers used to blow away their parents. In a previous article, I called Lyle’s virtually undetectable false hair a masterpiece of wigmaking. First-time visitors to the courtroom would invariably ask, “Which one is the one with the wig?” It would have surprised no one in the six-month soap opera that the trial became if the defense had talked Lyle into removing his deep secret on the stand, but good taste prevailed.

The defense claimed that until the moment Kitty pulled the hairpiece off Lyle, Erik did not know that his brother wore a toupee. The defense further claimed that the sight of his older brother’s baldness and the sudden awareness of his brother’s vulnerability and embarrassment freed Erik to confess to Lyle his own deep secret, that their father had been sexually molesting him for 12 years.

That one brother did not know the other brother wore a hairpiece was hard to swallow. A man’s toupee is not like a woman’s wig, which can be slipped onto the head easily. The wearing of a toupee involves elaborate preparations before a bathroom mirror, and the various means of attachment, such as glue, hooks, and lure locks, tried by Lyle before he settled on the method he liked best could not have gone unnoticed. This is not a fool-your-brother kind of thing. Marzie Eisenberg told me that Jose had often discussed Lyle’s hair problem with her, and had told her that Lyle worried about his hair all the time. A person formerly connected to the firm where Lyle ordered his hair replacements told me Lyle was “consumed with his hair.” A friend of Lyle’s who was in constant touch with him during the trial told me rather flippantly that he seemed to worry more about his toupee than about the outcome of the trial, and that he was deeply upset when he was informed that it was off center one day in the courtroom. It is highly unlikely that a balding brother who suddenly appeared with a full head of hair would have gone unnoticed or unremarked upon by his only sibling.

When Lyle first went to the Hair Replacement Center on Wilshire Boulevard in west Los Angeles on February 4, 1988, he was already in possession of a toupee, with which he was dissatisfied, claiming it shed. The new model he ordered cost $1,450. He got a trade-in of $400 for his used toupee. For that first piece, Model 124 EX, and the three that followed from the Hair Replacement Center over the next year and a half, he always insisted on 100 percent human hair. The piece had three inches of hair in front, four inches on the sides, and five inches in back. It required four to six weeks for delivery. A person who formerly worked at the center told me that Lyle always knew exactly what he wanted and exactly how high the piece should be placed on his forehead. On one, he ordered a permanent wave. On another, he requested sun-streaking and highlights.

The former employee told me of a conversation he once had with Lyle. Lyle said, “I wish I could stop wearing this thing. It’s hot and perspiry.”

He replied, “You don’t have to wear it. No one’s forcing you to wear it.”

Lyle said, “I have an image to keep up. My father told me I had an image.”

He ordered his fourth hairpiece on July 28, 1989. It is noted on that order form that the piece must be ready by September 3, 1989. The shotgun deaths of his parents occurred on August 20, 1989. Lyle returned again to the center on August 25, 1989, five days after the slayings, for an adjustment. That was also the day of the first memorial service for his dead parents. He was given a baseball cap to cover his baldness in the waiting room while the work was being done. Once inch of hair was removed from the front and back of the piece and replaced with new hair. Excessive perspiration, or poor hygiene, had caused the perimeter of the hair to take on a different texture.

Marzie Eisenberg said that the memorial service at the Directors Guild in Hollywood was scheduled for noon. By 11:45 the auditorium was packed to capacity with Industry people. Lyle and Erik arrived late, between 12:30 and 12:45. “They strolled in. Lyle had one hand in the pocket of his suit. I wanted to smack him. I wanted to plaster him against the wall,” said Eisenberg. “Erik seemed very upset. He was scheduled to give the eulogy. I said to Lyle, ‘Are you sure Erik can do this?’ Lyle answered, ‘Marzie, don’t worry. My brother’s a very good actor.’ I was not allowed to tell that story on the stand. The defense objected. I was getting very uncomfortable with Lyle. I was thinking, Something’s wrong with this picture—this is not how you behave when your parents are killed. Little things like that kept happening. He was very disinterested, uncaring, unfeeling.”

Who says I can’t fill my father’s shoes? Thesearemy father’s shoes. —Lyle to Marzie Eisenberg in the limousine after his parents’ memorial service.

On March 6, 1991, while in the Los Angeles County Jail, Lyle ordered still another hairpiece, Model 124 EX again, with no part. A note on the order form said that the customer would not be able to come in for a fitting, and the piece was made on a previously ordered mold. Although the new piece would be delivered to Lyle in the jail, no outside professional was allowed to touch Lyle’s hair or hairpiece. All the previous means of affixing his false hair to his head—fusion, tracking, etc.—were disallowed in jail. He now uses a product called Topstick Strips by Vapon, which are two-sided precut double-A clear tapes. He is permitted to have only two sticks of the tape a day, to hold the hairpiece on for courtroom appearances. He cannot wear the piece in jail.

If nothing else, the killing of the mother is totally, completely unjustified, and I don’t understand why the jury was out longer than 15 minutes. —Jonathan Alter, Newsweek media critic, on Charlie Rose, January 12, 1994.

To return to the story-conference simile that Billy Wilder used about the defense case: the problem remained Kitty. Was she bad enough yet? What else can we say about her? What about poison?

During the trial, Erik mentioned that he had feared his mother was trying to poison the family. A former girlfriend of Lyle’s, Traci Baker, took the stand and told a strange tale of a family dinner she had had in the Menendez home. While Baker never used the word “poison”on the stand, the bottom line of her testimony was to suggest that Jose also thought his wife was trying to poison the family. She said that Jose had gotten up from the table and taken her and his sons to Hamburger Hamlet, leaving Kitty behind. The story always seemed incredible to me: a woman who tries to poison her family is a woman who gets put away in an asylum. I have no doubt that Kitty served a rotten meal on occasion, especially when she was mad, but that is quite a different thing from poisoning her husband and sons. Never was it even hinted that Jose and his sons were not right back at Kitty’s table for breakfast the next morning or dinner the next evening.

There is a disconcerting subtext to the poison story. A few people, myself included, have seen a photocopy of a letter of several handwritten pages addressed to Traci Baker by Lyle Menendez from jail. It is not known whether baker received it, and it did not surface in time to be introduced into the trial. In it, Lyle gives Baker full instructions on what to say on the sand. He tells her to read the letter, make notes from it, and then get rid of it. He tells her how to describe the incident. “We will decide later around what date this incident occurred,” he writes. In the letter, he refers to his parents as Mr. and Mrs. Menendez, as if to indicate how Baker is to speak of them. With great attention to detail, he tells her who was sitting next to whom at the dining-room table. He says that Mrs. Menendez was not seated; she was bringing “this and that” in from the kitchen. He describes how his father asked his wife “in a stern voice” if she had done something to the food. Then he pushed his plate away, knocking over some “stuff.” He describes how his father told Baker, Erik, and him to leave the table and wait outside. He tells how Mr. Menendez took them to dinner at Hamburger Hamlet. He says he or Erik asked his father if he thought his mother had “tried” something. He says that his father said about his mother, “I don’t trust her today.” He says it was obvious Mr. Menendez thought his wife “did something” to the food. Lyle tells Baker not to remember the unimportant bits of conversation. He tells her that if she is unsure of anything she is asked on the stand the best answer is always “I don’t remember.”

During a withering cross-examination by Pamela Bozanich, Lyle admitted that he had lied when he called 911 on the night of the killings, that he had lied frequently to the police, that he had lied to his tennis coach, to newspaper reporters, and to members of his family. But he insisted that he was not lying now.

The Menendez brothers are documented liars. Their 911 call to the Beverly Hills police to report the “discovery” of the dead bodies of the parents they had killed more than an hour before will always remain a classic in the deception genre. Perhaps Lyle’s crying was real in that call. Perhaps even grief was involved in that genius moment. In all fairness, one must assume that the initial sight of the carnage they had created when they returned from getting rid of their bloody clothes and the shotguns must have been brutalizing to their senses. However, whether in grief or fakery, they were still lying. Every word spoken through the tears and the agonized cries was a lie. Later that night, and for the next seven months, until they were arrested, they continued to lie convincingly to the police. It was difficult to believe that either Lyle or Erik had discovered the beauty of truth while incarcerated in the Los Angeles County Jail and facing the gas chamber. If Lyle Menendez had embraced truth, as he claimed he had, why did he ask, according to court documents, his then girlfriend, Jamie Pisarcik, during a jailhouse visit, to lie on the stand and say that Jose had come on to her? Why did he write the letter of instructions to Traci Baker?

One bewildering aspect of the justice system is that the rights of victims do not equate with the rights of criminals. Many facts of both brothers’ lives that seemed extremely pertinent to the case were declared inadmissible. “Objection, Your Honor. More prejudicial than probative” was heard over and over. No ruling on the inadmissibility of evidence seemed more puzzling to me than that concerning the screenplay entitled Friends, which Erik Menendez wrote with his onetime best friend Craig Cignarelli 20 months before the Menendez brothers killed their parents. The screenplay was amateurish, but the thinking behind it was not. It concerned a young man who shotguns his parents to death for their money. Its inadmissibility was a serious blow to the prosecution, for it certainly suggested a genesis for the terrible crime that would transpire. The inadmissibility became even more puzzling when I discovered midway through the trial, owing to a chance encounter with Craig Cignarelli, that the screenplay had been revised by Erik. Later, this was confirmed for me by Detective Les Zoeller of the Beverly Hills police, who had been given the revised script by Cignarelli. The revisions, which I subsequently saw, are in Erik’s handwriting, and bear many striking parallels to the Menendez household. At times the hero, Hamilton Cromwell, has an uncanny resemblance to Erik. His eulogy at this parents’ funeral reads:

My father was not a man to show his emotions. I know that he loved his family and his close friends very much. I can only hope that he loved me as much as he loved all of you. Sometimes he would tell me that I was not worthy to be his son. When he did that, it would make me strive harder to go further, to prove to him that I was worthy just so I could hear the words, “I love you, son.”[Tears well up in Hamilton’s eyes.] Nothing I have ever done was good enough for this man and I never heard those words. But I know he thought them.

He’s not the wellest duck in the world. —Leslie Abramson discussing Erik Menendez in the court transcript.

A perplexing note throughout the trial was the health of Erik Menendez. In the nearly four years of his incarceration, he had fared far worse physically than this brother. It was not only that the swagger and rich-boy cockiness of his arraignment period were gone; he had somehow diminished in a noticeable way by the start of the trial. When he first took the stand, Abramson called attention to his pallor. He explained that his color was due to lack of sunlight. It was subsequently reported that his extreme weight loss was the result of his inability to eat the jailhouse food.

On Saturday, November 6, the word spread that Erik was in the Los Angeles County U.S.C. Medical Center trying to pass a kidney stone. The following Monday, we learned that it was not a kidney stone but a blood clot in the kidney. One reporter asked Leslie Abramson in the corridor, “Isn’t Erik very young to have that sort of kidney problem?”

Abramson, whose answers are rarely limp, gave a limp answer: “He fell. He hit himself against a doorknob.”

In Florida, a relative told a reporter that Erik had been beaten up by a jail guard, but that theory was instantly dismissed. If it had been true, the defense would certainly have turned it to their advantage, claiming that their client was not being properly guarded in jail. Then the story was advanced that Erik had been kicked in the kidney by another prisoner. He was out for five days. His medical records for that period disappeared. Other stories started to circulate, of a more bizarre nature. But the mystery remained unsolved.

What was the trial’s best “Perry Mason” moment?

(a) Defense expert Ann Burgess backing up her theory that fear had “rewired” Erik’s brain by citing research on snails.

(c) Prosecutor Lester Kuriyama to Erik: “Did you know that Big 5 stopped carrying handguns in March of 1986?”

(d) Jerome Oziel on tape crooning an Elvis tune.

Answer: (c). —Paul Slansky, Newsweek, December 27, 1993.

Although in film and television shows about trials, dramatically charged moments are a dime a dozen, in real trials there are rarely surprise elements or revelations. Everything is hashed out between prosecution and defense before a witness takes the stand, and either side can object to something the other side plans to ask a witness—a process that virtually eliminates the possibility of surprise. But one jolting moment occurred in the Menendez trial, and it belonged to the gentlemanly and scholarly Lester Kuriyama, a man not much given to the courtroom histrionics of his adversary, Leslie Abramson. The prosecution contended that the several-hour drive the brothers took to San Diego to buy the shotguns two days before the killings conclusively established that premeditation was a factor. In order to disprove this prosecution stand on premeditation, both brothers claimed that they had first gone to a Big 5 store in Santa Monica, only a few miles from the house on North Elm Drive, to buy handguns, but after discovering that there was a 15-day waiting period for handguns, they had abandoned the idea. They said they got on the freeway and more or less ended up in San Diego—as if that had not been a destination that they had in mind—where they bought two Mossberg 12-gauge shotguns, paying for them in cash.

Lester Kuriyama did not let go of their earlier visit to the Big 5 in Santa Monica, where, Erik had said, the guns rested on the top shelf of a glass case. His questioning about the brothers’ visit there became more and more specific.

“There were guns on the top, that’s what I remember seeing,” said Erik.

“There were handguns that you were seeing?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know the difference between an automatic and a revolver handgun? Like, the revolver would be the kind you see in Western movies?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see those as well as the other kind that you see in the more recent movies—what you would call an automatic?”

“I don’t remember seeing if … I don’t remember. I specifically remember seeing the ones that did not have a revolver.”

“At some point you picked out a handgun that you thought was appropriate, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Did your brother also pick one out?”

“I suppose. I don’t remember.” …

“Do you recall the caliber you decided on?”

The questioning went on and on, each question more specific. Erik had an answer for everything. Then Kuriyama dropped his bombshell: “Mr. Menendez, did you know that Big 5 stopped selling handguns in March of 1986?”

Television, which is not allowed to show the juries, and which rarely shows the spectators or the media, did not convey the full effect of that moment in the courtroom—the gasps, the openmouthed expression on the faces of some of the jurors, the grim bowed heads of certain family members. The word “electrifying” hardly conveys the shock of that moment.

Erik, caught, remained surprisingly calm. His eyes widened. You could almost see him think. He did not break down or become hysterical. He answered, “No, I don’t know that. And, Mr. Kuriyama, there were guns there, and we did look at them.”

But he had lied, and Kuriyama had caught him.

Leave Erik alone or you’ll be blown away. —Death threat called in to Lester Kuriyama during his cross-examination of Erik Menendez, taken by a secretary in the office of Gil Garcetti, the district attorney of the county of Los Angeles. For several days Kuriyama wore a bulletproof vest and briefly received police protection.

What is it like for rich boys in the Los Angeles County Jail? During the trial, Court TV made a short documentary about the Menendez brothers’ jailhouse existence, pointing out that Erik said his fear of rape was so great that he did not use the showers. Instead, he sponged himself, birdbath-style, in the sink in his cell. He is also repeated as saying that the food in the jail was so terrible that he had only the milk for breakfast, saving what he didn’t drink in the toilet to keep it cool.

Sandra Sharp, who once taught both brothers at the exclusive Princeton Day School, was a witness for the defense. She was particularly fond of Lyle, with whom she had had a longer association. During her time in Los Angeles, she visited both brothers in jail. It was far easier to see Erik, who could have unlimited visitors for an hour four days a week, than to see Lyle, who was allowed visitors only two days a week. Lyle is held in tighter security than Erik. When Lyle came in, Sharp said, he was wearing handcuffs.

“Was that embarrassing for him in front of you?” I asked her.

“He made a joke of it. He said, ‘How do you like my jewelry?’ I told him to get his act together. I said, ‘You must show a little remorse.’ He said, ‘I know, but I’m just so scared.’ We were told by the lawyers not to talk about the trial, and we didn’t. Erik is doing a lot of reading in jail. Leslie brings him books on philosophy and art history. He said he was happy to talk to a teacher. He cried during the visit.”

A recently released prisoner, who had been in the same cellblock as Lyle for two and a half years, went to the Van Nuys courthouse of his own accord the day after his release. He waned to tell prosecutors Pamela Bozanich and Lester Kuriyama that Lyle had read every book he could find on the sexual molestation of children while he was in jail, and that they should not believe the defense. Later the former prisoner talked to certain reporters. He described Lyle as the most disliked prisoner in the jail. While other prisoners had only half an hour a day during which to make phone calls, Lyle had virtually unlimited use of the telephone. “He hogged it,” said the former prisoner.

The Menendez brothers are inveterate telephone callers. From the phones in their cellblocks, they keep in touch with a wide variety of people, including relatives, friends, some actors up for roles in upcoming mini-series about their case, some court watchers who have corresponded with them, a few reporters, and people who have become their friends in the years of their incarceration. There is a great cachet in getting a message on your machine saying, “Lyle Menendez called,” or “Erik Menendez called.” And people tend to talk.

At first Lyle was in tighter security than his brother because guards had discovered a shank in his cell. Shanks are bladelike weapons that prisoners make from found pieces of metal or plastic. “Anyone else would have got charged with it,” the former prisoner continued. “It’s an automatic two years added onto your sentence.” Subsequently, after the trial started, Lyle asked for protection from other prisoners.

During part of the trial, Lyle formed a cellblock friendship with Damian Williams, one of the defendants in the Reginald Denny case. They were both celebrities together, both stars of Court TV in concurrent gavel-to-gavel cases. As the Menendez brothers’ fame increased, Lyle liked to have the call-ins from Court TV’s Prime Time Justice taped for him so that he could listen to what was being said about Erik and him. The brothers received more fan mail than any other prisoners in the jail. For a while, they answered every letter, but as the letters began to number in the thousands, they were unable to keep up. In jail, Lyle read Ayn Rand as well was the John Grisham novel A Time to Kill.

We were told that the brothers did not see each other during the nearly four years of their incarceration, except when they were taken to and from the courthouse. And they did not. They are in different cellblocks on different floors of the jail. However, what is virtually unknown is that through an elaborate telephone system, paid for by their grandmother, the Menendez brothers have been able to talk to each other almost every night, sometimes for as long as an hour, as well as to friends and relatives, at least one of whom subsequently took the stand as a witness in their defense.

The system worked like this: Each night Lyle and Erik placed collect calls at the same time from their cellblocks to two individuals in the 818 area code. The numbers they called were not the listed numbers of the individuals. A different instrument with a different number had been installed at each house, and the number was unlisted. Lyle, from his prison phone, was patched through to Erik, on his phone, and the brothers chatted away, presumably planning their strategy, in total privacy. No one was the wiser. There were no records of anything more than the local collect calls placed from the jail to the houses in the San Fernando Valley. Long-distance calls were placed the same way, from jail to the 818 numbers and then to, say, Florida, for instance, with no records anywhere. The bills for this elaborate ruse, undiscovered during the course of the trial, were sent to the grandmother of the Menendez brothers.

They kept Granny from the trial so she wouldn’t stand up and object to what was being said about Jose. —A family friend, speaking of Maria Menendez, the grandmother of Lyle and Erik.

Maria Menendez continues to live in the unfinished, unsold, Menendez dream house in Calabasas. Even before the prosecution rested back in August, she had stopped coming to the courthouse, whether of her own volition or through the persuasion of others. That does not mean that she was unaware of the proceedings involving her slain son and her killer grandsons, all of whom she loved. She had her little coterie of friends who attended the trial and reported all the courtroom gossip to her. Visitors to her home told me she still pulled out all the old photograph albums of her successful son, of whom she was so proud. The pictures of years of family life of Jose and Kitty and Lyle and Erik that she fondly shows to friends are in stark contrast to the saga of misery and fear that the defense depicted the existence of the Menendez brothers to have been. It is known that Maria Menendez, who is 76, has been severely disappointed with certain members of her family who took the stand and said bad things about Jose and Kitty.

I have always looked up Maria Menendez as a gallant, almost operatic figure, the indomitable matriarch of a once proud family that has been decimated by violence, death, and betrayal. During the terrible Los Angeles fires in early November, the flames came right to the edge of her property, but she, the long occupant, refused to leave. Maria Menendez had always believed that the Mafia was involved in the slaying of her son and his wife. Even when it became apparent that her grandsons were the killers, she maintained that they had somehow been duped into the crime by the Mafia. One of the lingering mysteries of the case is that the weapons, the two Mossberg 12-gauge shotguns, have never been recovered, even though the brothers claimed that they had thrown the guns down a hillside off Mulholland Drive. Their grandmother contended that the Mafia did away with the guns. The Mafia had been a recurring theme throughout the Menendez crime story. On the murder night, during the brothers’ questioning by the Beverly Hills police, in which they lied so brilliantly that the police did not suspect them, they hinted that the Mafia might have been responsible. During the investigative period, Marta Cano, Jose Menendez’s sister, who later turned against her brother on the stand, suggested to Detective Les Zoeller that a video-packaging company with Mob ties which Jose had ceased doing business with might possibly have been involved in the rubout. An interesting sidelight is that Erik Menendez, who had a penchant for establishing his credentials by talking about his rich family, told several of his friends in the year before the killings that his father had $75 million in a Swiss bank account.

Is it an earthquake

Or simply a shock?

Is it the good turtle soup

Or merely the mock? —Cole Porter, “At Long Last Love.”

Then came the earthquake, and it was indeed the real turtle soup, 6.6 on the Richter scale. It jolted an entire city and its environs from sleep at 4:31 a.m. on Monday, January 17. At least 56 people died, thousands were injured, tens of thousands became homeless. Freeways collapsed. The city became incapacitated. Governor Pete Wilson said the disaster could be one of the costliest in United States history. A curfew was called by Mayor Richard Riordan. President Clinton arrived to survey the damage.

The Lyle Menendez jury, with 22 days of deliberation behind them, had still not reached a verdict, although they must have known that 4 days earlier Erik’s jury had deadlocked, resulting in a mistrial. The earthquake damaged the homes of many of Lyle’s jurors. The Van Nuys courthouse, four miles from the epicenter, was also damaged, and there were threats of asbestos in the air. The jury reconvened in a trailer on January 24.

No sooner was the telephone system working than Lyle was back on the phone. He said the quake had thrown him from the top bunk in his cell to the floor, where he took refuge under a metal table. He received minor cuts and bruises. He claimed that jailhouse deputies had abandoned the building, leaving prisoners behind.

It’s nonsense, all this talk that there’s a good brother and a bad brother. Lyle is wonderful. They’re both adorable. —Leslie Abramson, quoted in Vanity Fair, October 1990.

I don’t want Erik to be taking the rap for Lyle. The evidence in this case does not prove that Erik killed anybody. —Leslie Abramson in her closing argument to Erik’s jury, December 14, 1993.

We were appalled at what she said about Lyle in the closing argument. —Menendez relative.

It began in a blaze of gunfire in a mansion in Beverly Hills and it ended four and half years later with an impotent dénouement in a trailer courtroom in Van Nuys, when Lyle’s jury, just like Erik’s, informed Judge Weisberg that after weeks of deliberation it was unable to arrive at a verdict. Juror No. 4, the one we had called Willie throughout the trial, piped up to the judge, “The gap is too wide.”

It’s the old story. Things are different for the rich in a criminal situation. Had the exact same killings been committed, the same shotguns used, the same number of shots fired, the same everything, by young defendants from a less swell part of town, South-Central Los Angeles, say, the trial would probably have lasted eight or nine days, and there would probably have been a different ending.

No matter how you slice it, the two hung juries have to be considered a sort of triumph for Leslie Abramson and her co-counsel. She took what was virtually an open-and-shut case of premeditated murder in the first degree and for six months shifted the focus to a drama about child abuse. She had a genius for creating distraction from the main event, diverting the minds of both juries away from the ghastly sight of blood, guts, and two dead bodies. The victims became incidental figures. The shabby love affair of Dr. Oziel and Judalon Smyth took up weeks. Weeks more were given over to the ponderous pronouncements of expert witnesses, the hired guns of the legal system, who found reasons why the blown-off face of Kitty and the blown-out brains of Jose could be direct consequences of their treatment of Erik and Lyle.

As of now, we wait for the announcement of the date of the retrial of the Menendez brothers. And as we wait, we wonder if a new precedent has not been set for parricide.

Dominick Dunne is a best-selling author and special correspondent for Vanity Fair. His diary is a mainstay of the magazine.

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